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So let me explain what this is. I’ve wanted for a long time to try and condense my thoughts about Christianity into one place, and I doubt it’s something that I could ever encapsulate within one project. But I’ve thought of an idea for a book, in which I go through the major points of the Bible and talk about my perspective on those stories and characters, and how they’ve influenced the world today, and basically just try and deconstruct Christianity, to understand something that has caused me so much heartache and which I feel is such a powerfully harmful force in the world.

Truthfully, I’ve always found most of Christianity’s central mythos incredibly uninspiring, at least when told from the point of view of God as the protagonist. There’s not a lot of magic and adventure, and it’s mostly concerned with farming and deserts. As for the players of the story, Satan is by far a more interesting character who seems to have a much more moral stance, and God consistently behaves in ways that are irrational and inexplicably cruel. Earlier today I wrote down a conceptual outline for the chapters of the book, with each chapter being focused around a certain character or character. For instance, chapter one would be called Adam and Eve, chapter two would be Satan, chapter three would be Cain and Abel, etc. And I could go chronologically through the Christian Bible and touch on the things that interest me and that I want to talk about. The final chapter would be focused on the central character of the Bible, God himself, and would cover the book of Revelation.

I started to get ideas for a prologue, starting the story out right before the creation of the universe, and treating God in the most sympathetic and compassionate light. I’m actually really quite proud of this so I’d love any feedback you may have.

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The beginning is not the beginning. The beginning of all things is a mystery, perhaps forever unsolvable. We don’t even know that there was a beginning. But this story begins with a creature, a being who is alone, floating in the vast darkness of the cosmos, floating in nothingness. We don’t know what he looks like. We only call him “he” because it’s the way he will later refer to himself. Perhaps he is vaguely humanoid, with two arms and two legs, hands and feet, and a head fitted with eyes, ears, a nose and mouth. Perhaps he is curled, fetus-like, sleeping in the vast emptiness, dreaming in the dark womb of nothingness, waiting to be born into the cosmos. Perhaps he is a tiny speck, perhaps he is large and monstrous, and perhaps, like all of existence, he is void and without form.

Where did he come from? Does even he know? Is he the only being in existence, or is he a being left over from some previous existence? Was there an ending before all of this? Was there a cataclysm that destroyed the entire cosmos and reduced it to nothingness, leaving only this sleeping catalyst? Was the past universe like a plant that upon it’s death, drops seeds of new life, and this sleeping creature is that seed? What is the nature of this being? Does he have emotions, thoughts, desires? Does he feel pain or love, is he lonely? Is there anyone to equal him, a companion to share his existence with, another being like him? Could he even create another like himself if he wanted? Were there others like him once, and now only he is left?

Perhaps he unfurls his body, such as it is, and stretches his muscles and joints, such as they are. Perhaps he looks around and sees the nothingness. Perhaps he feels afraid. Did he have a mother or father? Did he have a family? Does he remember the answer to this question? Perhaps he looks behind himself, at that expanse of darkness that is the same as every other expanse of darkness. Does he see the past? Or is it as much a mystery to him as it is to all who come after?

Those answers will never come. The mysterious being closes his eyes and gathers his thoughts and emotions. He gathers everything he has, and prepares for one magnificent display, he prepares to create everything. He holds out his hands, and he opens his eyes and his mouth, and creation begins.

A vast explosion, a soundless cosmic bang, and all the light of all the stars and all the galaxies comes pouring from one point of light in the vast darkness, and that point of light is the being who lay in the darkness, and from him come planets and meteors and dust and fire, moons and nebula and molecules and atoms and cells and water, from him comes the infinitely expanding universe with it’s constants and it’s laws, it’s various physics and biologies, it’s planets of rock and mountain and ocean, and from him comes mathematics and science and future and past and magic and reason, pain and hope and love and loss and possibility and infinity.

He finds himself floating in a sparkling universe, still racked with the painful explosions that are it’s birth cries, he looks around at the terrified newborn cosmos, and he smiles, holds out his hands over a sphere of water and rock, and he opens his mouth to speak.

(Notes from the FUTURE: The numbering system on my blog has been weird forever. I didn’t initially number my blog entries, then at some point I briefly started numbering my poetry posts but then I stopped. When I started a seperate blog that was intended to be more of a journal [and which was ultimately moved here] on Livejournal, I numbered the posts, and I really enjoyed doing that. My plan here was to start a new series of blogs where I numbered each entry, ideally writing every day. It didn’t work out that way. I can’t say what the numbering system looks like now if it does exist anymore, but originally this post was titled “#1: I’m Terrible At Beginnings.” – 4/19/2016)

It applies to every part of my life: I suck at beginnings. When I write, I start in the middle of a scene, almost always in the middle of a story. In a relationship, I’m terrible in the beginning: I overthink things, I scrutinize, I make things harder, I cry, I have anxiety attacks, I panic. Beginnings are difficult for me, and that’s why this post has taken me about five weeks.

Yep, five weeks. Maybe give or take a week or two. It’s a simple idea: write every day. And if you miss a day that’s fine, but number the posts, and then it’s an ongoing project. And you can write about what’s on your mind.

Every day, I want to write about something. I want to write about my day, about what I’m thinking about, what I’m listening to, what I’m reading, what I’m afraid of. So many things. But I never start, because I don’t want to write the FIRST one. The one where I begin, and explain what needs to be explained, and talk about how I’ve had this blog for six years but have hardly really written actual journal entries about my life, my thoughts. It’s because whenever I do, I usually write a really lengthy and well thought out post, and then I hold myself to that standard in the future, and I’m afraid to write something small, because it won’t be as good as the previous post. It won’t be an “article.” It won’t be good enough.

And that’s why I’m taking this time to just start the damn thing. Sometimes my writing is good, sometimes it’s fluid and I use a lot of fun words and it reads well, and I’m proud of it. And sometimes it’s pulled right out of my head from that moment, and I’m still proud of that too. The point is I want to create something. My phone and my notebooks are filled with ideas for blog entries. I want to write about musicians I love, I want to write about discovering music and books and art, I want to write about my opinions, I want to write about things that scare me, I want to write about my own WRITING, the novel I’ve been trying to bring into the world for years. I want to write about my life. About how EVERYTHING has changed.

I want to write about how I came close to suicide. I want to write about how sometimes I still find myself on the ledge. I want to write about mental health, about my Obsessive Compulsive Disorder and how it’s affected my life, I want to write about my anxiety. I want to tell my story.

But there’s just SO much to tell. And I never know where to begin. I thought about beginning these journals with entry #2, just so that I don’t ever have to write the first one, and if I want, I can retroactively add in the first one. I’m terrible at STARTING projects. As it happens I’m also not great at finishing them. But in the middle, I’m great at that part! I want to write what’s in my head as it happens. If I write down an idea for a blog post, I’ll come back to it three days later and think “I don’t really want to write about that anymore.”

I have so much to say. The thing about dying that scares me the most is that I’ll leave the world without ever having said all the things I want to say, or playing the songs in my heart, or writing the stories in my head (maybe they should be coming more from my heart than my head, maybe that’s the problem, maybe I’ve made a breakthrough, I don’t know).

I know this reads disjointed, or at least I think it reads that way, I don’t know because I’m not reading it, I’m writing it. I’m feeling a little like Delirium right now (and by extension, maybe a little like Tori Amos? I don’t know, I haven’t met her. I’ve met her in music, though).

I want to talk about everything. I want to say everything. What I want more than anything is to tell the truth.

The beginning of this blog is a little hard to read, if I go back and look at those entries from six years ago, when I was twenty, and when I was terrified, and when I was desperately trying to be positive. It feels so fake now, reading it, but I know that my attempt to be positive helped me then. I ended every entry by blessing the reader, by being positive, even though I was in a very stale, very negative, very terrible place. I was plagued by guilt, and lies, and hatred, and love too. I hated and loved someone very much. And I hated and loved myself very much. Now I’m in a place where I can be honest with myself. I recognize dishonesty in myself when it happens, and usually I do my best to stop it.

I try to tell the truth. That’s important to me. Some people lie until their lie becomes truth. I just tell the truth. Sometimes the truth is horrifying, or… breaking. I can’t say heartbreaking because it’s not just that. It’s not just heartbreaking or mindbreaking, it’s breaking. The truth can break. That sentence can mean a few things. Or maybe just two, I’m not sure, but I know that I’m still very broken. I will probably always be shattered, and that’s fine, I want to be authentically who I am, and if who I am is shattered, then cool.

There’s a lot to say. I’m shattered. My thoughts are in many places and go in many directions. But I want them to live, and to be expressed. I want to get them all out of me, so they can live. I want to give birth to my ideas. I want to create.

So, this is the first one. Unapologetically, the first one.

I’m starting. There aren’t any rules. I don’t have to write every day. I don’t have to stick to a schedule. But I’m writing now, and that’s that.

I found this video on YouTube of this 8th grade kid talking about his day at school and how he admires this gay couple at his school and about how hard it is to be gay when you’re in middle school. Well, some (presumable) adult was fucking picking on him and telling him that they raised their kids better and that he’s a queer and a dissapointment to his parents, and oh my god I flipped my shit. I’m so disgusted and appalled and sickened that a fucking grown-up would come on the internet and harass an eighth grade kid. It’s fucking disgusting, and it really makes me hate this fucking world we live in so much, and feel so sorry for the people who are brave enough to be themselves and even if they’re KIDS, they’re treated like shit for it.

THIS is why I can’t stand our culture. THIS is why I HATE Christianity. This is what’s fucking wrong with everything, these disgusting narrow-minded, backwards attitudes from people who are so insecure and small and weak that they have to pick on children and thrust beliefs that they don’t truly believe on to other people so that they can feel like they have some worth as a person, because they’re too afraid, due to their families, due to religion, and due to society, to look themselves in the mirror, and love themselves, and accept who they are.

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You know, I just want to say, it’s sad that Whitney Houston died. But I wish that every teenager and young adult who commuted suicide because they were hated and treated like shit for who they are received the same media attention. Because Whitney Houston caused her own death. She CHOSE to do drugs until it killed her. It’s sad, sure, but as important as Whitney Houston was to so many people, those gay kids who killed themselves were precious young human beings who didn’t even have the time to discover their talents and make a life for themselves, and they took their own lives because they were treated with anger and hatred over something that they HAD no choice in. Take stock: which death means what? No death is greater or less than another, nothing at all is greater or less than anything else with true things like this, like death. There are the deaths of these kids, children and young adults who never got to know who they are, and the death of a person who chose continually to do drugs until it killed them. A hundred deaths are equal to one death in the eyes of love, and these people have moved forward into their next state of existence, but Whitney lived a life full of love and acceptance and privilege and chose to do the drugs that killed her; these kids suffered as children, before they ever had a chance to experience their lives, and they left in a state of love so bruised and hurt that it drowned in the pressures and hatred of a society of pressures and hatred. They were kids who loved. They were the ones who had it right. And now they’re gone. The world is filled with less love now that they’re gone. May they be treated with dignity, respect, and love in their next existence.

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Animals love. They only know love, and they only know how to love 100%, they are incapable of anything but true love that has no ideas and situations surrounding it. And that’s what makes animal cruelty so terrible, because they don’t stop loving when their beaten, they fear but they still love 100%. It’s just like with small children who are beaten and who are abused; and as we grow older we forget that perfect love with which we began and cling to these concepts of “God” and “Heaven” as a means to try and get it back. Well it hasn’t gone anywhere, it’s still inside of us. And if we could just achieve the peace of mind and heart that an animal feels, we could be perfect again. We wouldn’t need to worry about a “Heaven,” and people wouldn’t spend their entire fucking LIVES WAITING for something to happen after it, they wouldn’t need to do that because if we would use the beautiful and powerful evolutionary gifts of intelligence to connect the mind and the heart, we could achieve animal peace, and we could achieve 100% love for ourselves and one another, and we could live in happiness. And I mean ACTUAL happiness. True emotion, and true living, without concepts, without things, without gods, without ideas, just love.

This idea people have of Heaven, well that’s what it is. Being connected eternally with the perfect love that is already inside of us. And the thing is, it’s SO possible for humanity to reach that state. It genuinely is, and people think that this sounds like a silly hippy dream but it’s NOT, it’s very real, and if we would drop concepts and start looking within ourselves and undoing the damage that has been done by this thing called civilization, and go back to the animal love and the state of peace we were designed in this planet to be, we would fit, we would make sense, and we would have love, and all meaning in this world would be gained, and we wouldn’t have to think about gods and heavens. We HAVE these things inside of us, and so many people choose to believe that it’s all on the “other side,” well it’s NOT on the other side, it’s here, love is here, and perfection is here, and it can be acheived, and EVERYONE WANTS THIS! That’s the thing, everyone wants it, and no one is willing to accept it, and to accept the gift of love that is already within ourselves. We may not get it perfectly right, and the next generation may not get it perfectly right, and 40 generations may not get it perfectly right, but one day we can and I hope that we will erase the damage that concepts and that religion and that ideas have done to this planet and this race of beautiful animals called humans.

Because this way of living is going to end at some point. Either with us using these powerful, beautiful minds to come together and to become one with the earth and with one another and with this environment that is truly ours, and to forget about the concepts of what lies up in the stars in “Heaven,” but connect with what we fear, “hell,” that truth which lies deep within the earth, we can find love and peace again. And if we choose not to do this, then we’re all going to kill each other with weapons and violence and reduce this race to nearly nothingness, and it’s all going to start over again, and the millions of years we’ve been evolving will not have taught us anything and we will not have reached the animal loving state, and the next humans will go through all that we’ve gone through and it will take them a long time to find that path to love, and we shouldn’t waste what we have now.

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Love is essentially the life force. It’s the word we’ve come to use for it. It should not be confused with affection, love is the life force. We feel the life force, and we have called the feelings that fill us love, but no, love is the life force. We are still connected to it as we have always been. Love can make us free. Love can bring us truly forth, love can summon us from hiding, love can live in us, and all can be true, and real, and worthy, and true.

We can be, as we have always had the choice and the ability and the love inside of us to be, alive.

It’s sad that we’re born in love and we spend the many years we have becoming more stressed, falling further away from that love, desperately crying for it, but never loving ourselves, never reaching inside and finding that pure, original love, and leaving this world the way we came in: love. We are love. We are born in love. We must move on in love. It is the life force. We must come closer to it, reach it and be love, because we are love.